Clipping shouldn't be done at the design level.
This is an application logic concern.
If the application did not impose a character limit, or imposed a large one, the design must accommodate this freedom.
This is an application logic concern.
If the application did not impose a character limit, or imposed a large one, the design must accommodate this freedom.
Without knowing the rendered width of the text string, you can't limit the text ahead of time. Or are you saying that all designs that can't accommodate text-wrapping should be avoided?
The HTML default is to flow elements to make space for larger conent. You need to go out of your way to break that.
If the subject line were wrapped, which would be nice at times, you’d lose this ability: you’d have to guess the approximate height of each element, and your scroll positions will be imprecise and you’ll have to make messy adjustments from time to time. Overall it generally won’t be too bad so long as there’s not too much variation in them, but it’s definitely still inferior.
You can then read the full subject line and other truncated fields either by opening the email, or by hovering, as the full text is set as the tooltip. And here’s a general tip for others: if you do ever automatically truncate overflowing text, you should set the element’s tooltip to the full text.
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¹ Browser do have limits on how large you can make containers, and handle excess in different ways. IE had the lowest threshold of failure at around ten million pixels, beyond which point it would ignore values; the workaround I implemented in https://github.com/fastmail/overture/commit/8d01c74d8c5d4ae0... came as a direct result of a customer reporting that scrolling was broken in IE in their mailbox with a couple of hundred thousand emails. Firefox breaks a little after 2²⁴ pixels, also ignoring values, so it’s still covered in https://github.com/fastmail/overture/blob/0c9828a5b77ad14383... (note the IE stuff is gone because IE is dead! :-) ). WebKit-heritage browsers accept larger values, but clamp them to about 2²⁵ pixels. In all cases, the clamping solution means you can’t access the emails at the end of the list. C’est la vie.